In the creative work of a classic of contemporary art Nikolai Kasatkin, “actual landscape” is, perhaps, the most powerful vector of the landscape genre concept. In forms from the plein air etude to the “major” monumental painting the artist freely combines the motifs of the traditional landscapes of the Itinerants (Vasiliev, Shishkin, Levitan) with his own ideas about space. Breadth, distance and epic quality in Kasatkin’s landscapes are combined with a chamber quality and unbelievable detail, which would seem to be incompatible. Through the combination of these components we gain depth which draws us into the canvas, compels the viewer attentively not only to study what is seen, but to feel and experience it. One cannot try on that flexure of multiple-spaces, those emotions, with which the canvases breathe, it's impossible, because, as the artist admits himself: “My return to landscape – is the return to my first love, to myself”. In the geography of the creative work of the artist two points have been unquestionable and unchangeable during the course of several decades: Izmailovo and Vorontsovo. From the village Vorontsovo, in the Smolensk Region, Kasatkin has been taking inspiration for many years. The Moscow district Izmailovo, in which the city life and work of the artist unfold, has become not only the place of rethinking, of “the big”, universal landscape, but also the source of a genre of cityscape, radically new for him, but no less candid and in each case unexpected than the “traditional” landscape.

Izmailovo/Vorontsovo – is the location, ideally placed in space, of Kasatkin’s creative work; it is precisely here that he recreates, it would seem, one and the same places, but each time introducing a completely different, new content. Thus, for example, the canvas “Old etude” is either nostalgia or reflection on and around his own work of the year 1952: simultaneously a remake and a doubling of the image, and a profound metaphor, “a picture within a picture” – one of the “brand” techniques of the artist.

The convergence of colour à la Falk, of “naturalness” to the point of “blende” and the dialogue of times – this is what the viewer, who avoids any “admixtures” in pure art, will see in the pop/off/art gallery.